The main show at Staples Center doesn't start until 5 p.m. and doesn't air on the West Coast for three hours after that. But the majority of trophies – 70 in all – are being handed out across the street at Nokia Theatre during the Grammy Awards pre-telecast ceremony, streaming live and hosted by David Alan Grier.

R&B newcomer Frank Ocean, one of several artists entering these festivities with six nominations, lost his first right away when best short-form video went not to his collaboration with Kanye West & Jay-Z ("No Church in the Wild") but to Rihanna's jam with Calvin Harris, "We Found Love." It's Ri-Ri's fifth win overall.

Don’t care for this year’s Coachella double-whammy or simply didn’t get tickets in time?

Then perhaps you should consider traveling north for Memorial Day weekend.

Late last night the lineup was revealed for the next Sasquatch! music festival, May 24-27 at the Gorge Amphitheatre in George, Wash. Seeing as there are only so many acts to go ’round at these multiday events, the number of repeats who appear a month earlier in Indio is high, from top-tier names like the Postal Service, Sigur Rós, Vampire Weekend, Tame Impala, the Lumineers and the XX to those that fall a few lines lower, like Alt-J, Japandroids, Father John Misty, DIIV, Divine Fits and Dropkick Murphys.

But then there are a few exclusives, like headliner Mumford & Sons in what should be their first stateside festival appearance of the year, and at a most picturesque locale. Also playing there but not here are Arctic Monkeys, Empire of the Sun, Andrew Bird, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Primus, Cake, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Devendra Banhart, Primus, Imagine Dragons, Dirty Projectors and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros.

The festival, you'll recall from the end of last summer, is a gathering of indie, alt-rock, reggae and what-not at that little slice of beachside paradise in Dana Point, a counterpart to the stalwart Doheny Blues bash that organizers at Omega Events revived last year after halting operation in 2004. It returned to much joy just after Labor Day with (mostly) memorable turns from Ben Harper, Weezer and Cake.

This time the bill is already first-rate and still stands to deepen with additional artists. Though exact lineups aren't yet indicated for each day of the weekend event, slated for Sept. 8-9 at Doheny State Beach, it would appear that Jane's and Jimmy Eat World will close out the first half, with the Lips and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros (now there's a sweet pairing) finishing off the second.

Yet, whereas security's deliberately lax attitude toward crowd-surfing, stage-diving and the like seemed to take Dr. Dog off guard, the feeling of freedom that permeated the intimate room was in perfect harmony with the unfiltered spirits of vocalists Alex Ebert and Jade Castrinos and their gang of multi-instrumentalists.

With a setlist evenly comprised of previous favorites off the outfit's 2009 debut, Up from Below, and new tracks from their sophomore effort, Here, expected in late May (many premiered here), this show teetered on the line between looseness and professionalism without plunging into either extreme.

After the first spirited song, "Janglin," Ebert took several minutes letting front-row fans say their peace on the mic ("I could swim into your eyes!" one proclaimed). During the next tune, “Carries On,” he asked the crowd for input once more, extending the mid-song jam slightly while fans shouted out suggestions to replace the main lyric (“one love”) with other options (“one drug,” “one life”).

Later on, during a ragtime-esque new cut called “If You Wanna,” Ebert slipped into the crowd itself, singing the melody (distinctly similar in spots to John Lennon's “Imagine”) at eye-level before climbing back on stage and wondering aloud for several minutes what tune the band should play next. (He repeatedly admitted he couldn't remember the lyrics for many.)

Let's start with the Zeros, who are prepping for the release of their second album, Here, due in late May. Enter our random drawing to win one of five pairs of tickets we have to share by sending an email to bwener@ocregister.com no later than 5 p.m. Tuesday, March 13. Please put "Edward Sharpe" in the subject field and include your full name and phone number. Winners will be notified later that night.

And there's one more Observatory gig we can get you into next week: Peter Murphy, godfather of goth-rock via his role fronting Bauhaus, who returns to the former Galaxy Theatre to headline March 16, still touting last year's ninth solo album, imaginatively titled Ninth.

Enter that contest for tickets by sending an email to the same address, bwener@ocregister.com, no later than 5 p.m. Wednesday, March 14. For that drawing, put "Peter Murphy" in the subject field, and still include your full name and phone number. Winners will be notified by Thursday morning, March 15.

Many more of us, however, will see Alex Ebert & Co. when they make their headlining debut at the Greek Theatre on May 4, $30, just weeks before the release of the L.A. group's second album, Here, on May 29.

And still more of us may journey to Santa Barbara the next night, May 5, to see the Magnetic Zeros at Santa Barbara Bowl, $30-$35.

Tickets for both shows go on sale Saturday, March 10, at 10 a.m. (for the Greek) and noon (for the Bowl).

We've known for a few weeks that the (nearly) original Van Halen will make a swing through Southern California in late spring behind A Different Kind of Truth, their first album with quintessential VH vocalist David Lee Roth since 1984.

Now we know how much it will cost to see 'em: $29-$149.50, before service charges.

The Hall of Famers, whose other members are all namesakes -- Alex, Eddie and his son Wolfgang, seemingly a permanent replacement for bassist Michael Anthony at this point -- will play June 1 at Staples Center in Los Angeles, after which they head north for shows in Oakland (June 3) and San Jose (June 5), then head to Orange County for a June 12 stop at Honda Center.

You also can catch them June 14 at Valley View Casino Center (formerly San Diego Sports Arena) or get a jump on the whole run by heading to MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on May 27. Anyone else notice the considerable gaps all around these dates? Plenty of space for additional shows.

September 18th, 2011, 4:15 pm by DAVID HALL, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

After weeks upon weeks of 100-plus-degree weather with no precipitation, resulting in fires that ravaged more than 34,000 acres and 1,500 homes in the hill country just east of Austin (thankfully 95 percent contained now), Saturday's rainfall was a much-needed event.

But for those attending Day 2 of Austin City Limits' 10th annual music festival, reactions to the weather were slightly mixed. The rain wasn't torrential, and certainly seemed to spark more carefree dancing and jumping for the rousing close of an early afternoon set from Young the Giant. Likewise, it didn't stop throngs of families and diehard fans from crowding the main stage all day to ensure prime spots for Cee Lo Green and Stevie Wonder. But during Saturday's midsection, the downpour literally put a damper on things.

Though high winds were predicted along with the showers, they never came -- but concerned producers began dismantling scaffolding at the smaller stages anyway. Given recent deadly collapses in Indianapolis and at Belgium's Pukkelpop Festival, I can't blame ACL's producers for their caution, but the swift reactions left more than a few folks feeling unjustifiably unsettled, while photographers were barred from capturing Skrillex and Alexander (aka Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros) on the Google+ stage.

Missing the latter photo-op wasn't much of a loss: Ebert's solo tunes consisted mostly of dub-leaning guitar noodling with not-too-frequent relief from scattered soaring trumpet solos. At no point did his music evoke anything as emotionally uplifting as the material he crafts with the Zeros.

It only took a century of gathering gravestones and collecting tourists for the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to become something no one from Charlie Chaplin's day could have envisioned: a viable concert venue.

A dream-like one, at that, and so far put to judicious use -- they don't let just anyone trod in here and put on a show. It had better be special, an enhanced encounter: When singer-songwriter Justin Vernon brought his ethereal Bon Iver material to the grounds, for instance, it was performed at sunrise, after a mellow sleepover for a couple thousand fans who were treated to a hand-picked playlist, a wee-hours screening of Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket and a meditative wake-up blessing from Buddhist monks.

Every event so far, it seems, has set about capturing some kinda mood: Belle and Sebastian, whose winsome pop is perhaps best heard while strolling through a graveyard on a cloudy day (or cloudless night), took the stage after a showing of Trainspotting, while recent attraction Explosions in the Sky is an experimental instrumental ensemble that was made for such a cinematic locale.

No one, however, has put as much thought into their HFC appearance as the Flaming Lips did for their magnificent two-night stand at the cemetery, during which they superbly -- passionately, mournfully, exactingly, imperfectly yet still so perfectly -- performed two landmark albums in full.

On Tuesday, the selection was their (arguably) single greatest disc: The Soft Bulletin (1999), a crucial turning-point in the band's career that signifies for its catalog the way Side 2 of Meddle (aka “Echoes,” 1971) does for Pink Floyd. Everything before it -- from the Lips' weirdest hallucinations to the compact psych-pop delirium of their almost-a-hit “She Don't Use Jelly” -- amounts to fascinating (though sometimes impenetrable) undergraduate studies, an assortment of their final-exam works in Sonic Deconstruction 101, Advanced Psychedelic Noodling 365 and Intro to Iconoclasm 515.

1) Heading directly to Palm Desert for today's Big 4 metal festival after first catching the San Pedro stop on the Railroad Revival Tour, featuring Mumford & Sons and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, made for a very late night. Sleep was a must if I'm going to stay awake for Metallica. (Then again, the pyrotechnics should keep my eyes open.)

2) There really isn't much to say about this tour-by-train.

That doesn't mean it isn't a fine idea, riding the rails in vintage cars from the Bay Area (where the trek embarked after Mumford played a headlining set Monday night at Santa Barbara Bowl) on through New Orleans, where M&S plays the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival there on April 29. It remains to be seen just how Festival Express-y this gathering of throwbacks and traditionalists is becoming; all that hanging out in confined spaces should lead to plenty of collaboration on board, though we won't know to what extent until a planned documentary of this trip comes out. I love the accessibility of it all, too. If you had wanted to wait around the train station all day -- they were due to arrive at 11 a.m. but pulled in closer to 5 p.m., with Old Crow Medicine Show kicking things off on stage an hour later -- you could have glimpsed the most suddenly popular British bands in years and the most charmingly ragtag group of postmodern hippies to ever sprout out of L.A. stepping onto the station platform like Elvis hopping off Amtrak in 1957. That's old-fashioned celebrity simplicity you just don't see anymore.

The performances, however, though resolutely strong (Mumford) or intermittently rousing (Magnetic Zeros), were nonetheless routine. Led by a somewhat discombobulated Alex Ebert, a fine talent who has yet to learn how to rein in his rambling excesses on stage, Sharpe & Co. had their usual peaks and valleys, often within the same drawn-out song -- "Home," for instance, tends to deteriorate from a highly engaging singalong to a lazily meandering mid-section, and then build back again. They create ramshackle joy one moment, then haven't a clue what to do next. Some people love that carefree approach. I find it mildly tiresome after about 20 minutes.